> At the moment, BarFly uses a fixed spacing, spreading out the symbols
> to fill the available space (except for the last line which can be
> shortened if it only contains a few notes). This is not ideal, and I'd
> like to move to semi-proportional spacing, where long notes get a bit
> more space to draw attention to them and short notes get placed closer
> together. Obviously you don't want fully proportional spacing, where a
> whole note gets sixteen times as much space as a sixteenth note. The
> relationship needs to be non-linear, e.g. you might make the spacing
> proportional to the square root of the note length. Anyone know what
> the conventional rule for music engraving is here?

I think the best approach is the TeX way, where each symbol has three
associated spacing values - max, optimum, and min. The spacings for a
line as requested by the user are summed and if the sum exceeds
min/max then the space allocated to each symbolis adjusted according
to the optimum.

Cheers,
Calum

Ewan A. Macpherson

... Thanks, Jef. It would be useful to adjust how much space is added before and after gracenotes. Even more useful to me would be to be able to control

Thanks, Jef. It would be useful to adjust how much space is added
before and after gracenotes.

Even more useful to me would be to be able to control _whether_ any
space is added at all. It is rarely the case that a single gracenote
would not fit easily between two melody notes without any added
space, and not adding the space would preserve the uniformity of the
spacing of the melody notes. For example, in

L:1/8
{g}A{d}A{e}A ecA | {g}A{d}ce {g}dB{G}A |

one (I!) might like all the melody notes to have the same spacing.

Might I suggest a command like %%gracespaceignore N
where N means that a grouping of N or fewer gracenotes is not
provided with any extra space? If there are collisions between
gracenotes and preceding notes, they could be fixed manually using
the y spacing mechanism.

As always, thanks for your great work with abcm2ps!

cheers,
Ewan

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